10 000 Zlotys John Paul II, Trial Strike

Trial strikes from Mennica Polska in this period occupy an unusual category: produced not for circulation but to test dies and planchets, they were occasionally released through official channels or retained by mint employees, making provenance murky on nearly all surviving examples. This particular piece was struck the year Poland held its first partially free elections since the communist takeover — a political opening in which John Paul II's decade of moral pressure on the Warsaw government played a widely acknowledged role.